Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T00:06:03.256Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Styling men and masculinities: Interactional and identity aspects at work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2005

ALEXANDRA GEORGAKOPOULOU
ALEXANDRA GEORGAKOPOULOU
Affiliation:
Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Departing from interactionally focused research on the “representations” (cf. “constructions”) of the “other,” including recent dynamic approaches to the sociolinguistics of style/styling, this article looks into the practice of talk about men that resonated in the conversations of four Greek adolescent female “best friends.” The discussion sheds light on the interactional resources that participants draw upon to refer to and identify or categorize men, their local meanings, and their consequentiality for gender identity constructions (in this case, both masculinities and femininities). It is shown that personae and social positions of men are drawn in the data by means of a set of resources (nicknames, character assessments, stylizations, membership categorization devices) that occur in, shape, and are shaped by story lines (intertextual and coconstructed stories that locate men in social place and time). It is also shown that the men talked about are predominantly marked for their gendered identities: Social styles that represent men as “soft” (“babyish,” “feminine”) or “tough” (“hard”) are those that are more routinely invoked. Each mobilizes specific resources (e.g. stylizations of the local dialect for “hard” men), but both are drawn playfully. The conclusion considers the implications of such discursive representations for the gender ideologies at work and the participants' own identity constructions and subjectivities.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Birkbeck College Applied Linguistics seminars and at the 8th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Toronto, 2003. I am grateful to audiences there for their comments, to Nikolas Coupland for fiercely constructive criticism, to an anonymous reviewer for encouragement, and last but not least, to the sharp editorial eye of Jane Hill.

Keywords

Story linesgendermembership categorization devicesmenmasculinitiesstylingstylization
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 163 - 184
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Antaki, Charles, & Widdicombe, Sue (1998) (eds.). Identities in talk. London: Sage.
Baker, Carolyn (1997). Membership categorization and interview accounts. In D. Silverman (ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice, 130–43. London: Sage.
Bamberg, Michael (1997). Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:335–42.Google Scholar
Barrett, Rusty (1999). Indexing polyphonous identity in the speech of African American Drag Queens. In Mary Bucholtz et al. (eds.) Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse, 313–31. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bauman, Richard (2001). The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: Form, function, variation. In Eckert &Rickford (eds.), 57–77.
Bauman, Richard, & Briggs, Charles (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–8.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, & Maryns, Katrijn (2000). Stylistic and thematic shifting as a narrative resource: assessing asylum speakers' repertories. Multilingua 20:61–84.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (1999). Bad examples. Transgression and progress in language and gender studies. In Mary Bucholtz et al. (eds.), Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse, 3–24. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York & London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York & London: Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah, & Kulick, Don (2003). Language and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coates, Jennifer (1996). Women talk. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coupland, Nikolas (2001a). Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30:245–75.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas (2001b). Language, situation and the relational self: Theorising dialect style in sociolinguistics. In Eckert &Rickford (eds.), 185–200.
Eckert, Penelope, & Rickford, John R. (2001) (eds.). Style and sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2001). Arguing about the future: on indirect disagreements in conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 33:1881–1900.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2002). Narrative and identity management: discourse and social identities in a tale of tomorrow. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35:427–51.Google Scholar
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2003a). Looking back when looking ahead: adolescents' identity management in narrative practices. In J. Androutsopoulos & A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse constructions of youth identities, 75–91. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2003b). Plotting the “right place” and the “right time”: place and time as interactional resources in narratives. Narrative Inquiry 13:413–32.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie H. (1997). Toward families of stories in context. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:107–12.Google Scholar
Harvey, Keith (2002). Camp talk and citationality: A queer take on “authentic” and “represented” utterance. Journal of Pragmatics 34:1145–65.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane (1999). Styling locally, styling globally: What does it mean? Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:542–56.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T. (2001). “Style” as distinctiveness: the culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In Eckert &Rickford (eds.), 21–43.
Johnson, Sally, & Meinhoff, Ulrike (1996) (eds.). Language and masculinity. London: Blackwell.
Johnstone, Barbara (1999). Use of Southern-sounding speech by contemporary Texas women. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:505–22.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Newton, Brian (1972). The generative interpretation of dialect: A study of Modern Greek phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, Elinor (1992). Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking context, 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, Elinor, & Capps, Lisa (2001). Living narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rampton, Ben (1999). Styling the other: Introduction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:421–27.Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben (2003). Hegemony, social class and stylisation. Pragmatics 13:49–83.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1992). Lectures on conversation. 2 vols. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Silverstein, Michael (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories and cultural description. In Keith H. Basso & Henry A. Selby (eds.), Meaning in anthropology, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Spitulnik, Deborah (2001). The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic anthropology, 95–118. A reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Woolard, Kathryn A. (1998). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In Bambi Schieffelin et al. (eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory, 3–47. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.